Archive for May 2007

I’ve watched too much poker on television in the last month while I’ve been unemployed. I realized how bad it was this afternoon while watching the latest episode of The World Poker Tour. I’m recognizing dealers now. It’s not just that the Bellagio will use the same dealers on all WPT final tables for TV, but also on any other TV show that tapes at the casino.

The good news is, I found a new job and it starts on Wednesday. Those dealers will then be forgotten again.

Thursday, May 31 brings us the second of two full Moons for North Americans this month. Some almanacs and calendars assert that when two full Moons occur within a calendar month, that the second full Moon is called the “Blue Moon.”

Director Mike Figgis spent longer at LAX airport than intended. He’d arrived in Los Angeles, along with half the acting and directing world, for what is known as ‘pilot season’, when the big studios try out new scripts, directors and actors in a two-week frenzy of auditions and career make-or-breaks. When Figgis was being grilled by airport immigration, he was asked the purpose of his visit. Unthinking and tired after a long flight, Mike replied: ‘I’m here to shoot a pilot.’ After five hours in an interrogation cell (yes, really), he finally made it into town.

Update: Dagnabit, it’s been debunked. See the comments for links. Drat!

An insider told Page Six Osbourne was confirmed to perform on last week’s finale of “American Idol,” but canceled at the last minute “when he learned he would have to do a duet with Sanjaya. Ozzie said he didn’t want to be onstage with that idiot.”

Firefox 3 has integrated the Places code. “Places” is the new name for the database-driven bookmarking and history system in Firefox that was pulled out of Firefox 2 for Firefox 3. The early alphas now will include the first version of it.

100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I doubt any of them do, though. There isn’t a word on that list that I haven’t heard before, but I couldn’t give you a definition for all of them off the top of my head right now. Some of them came straight off the SAT study guide list, I imagine.

From fighting fires in New York City to winning $1 million on the grueling reality TV show “Survivor,” Tom Westman has embraced excitement and challenge and tasted fame.But now he’s a rookie working in relative obscurity at The Hartford, sporting a suit and tie instead of a fire hat or the shark-tooth necklace he wore in his bare-chested days on “Survivor: Palau.”
He’s pitching group life and disability insurance to brokers, who mostly don’t know – or care – that he skewered a shark with a machete to feed his starving “Survivor” tribe on the Pacific island of Palau.

The million dollar prize worked out to about $540,000 post-taxes. He fixed up the house, started a college fund for his three children, bought a nice grill, and then went to work in corporate America. He gets a fireman’s 20 year pension, too. He didn’t go crazy. He just created a slightly better life for his family.

I’m so proud of you all. Check out these stats from the VariousAndSundry.com logs:

More people are using Firefox than IE. I’m so proud. Nearly half of all people browsing this site use Firefox or Mozilla. IE is at 39%.

There’s some talk out there that web browser records such as this one are picking up activities from an Apple iPhone web browser type. No such luck for this site just yet, though we are getting 8% Safari stats.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE premiered last night. Fun show. The thing that always sticks out to me are the street dancers who show up. They have the most amazing acrobatics, senses of balance, and tricks that would break every bone in my body, and probably yours. But they’re not well trained. Very few of them make it to the next round, most are unable to deal with choreography or other styles. They’re awesome to watch, but this show is not cut out for them.

And every time I see one of them on the show this season, I’m going to immediately think of Blake Lewis now. He was the cool kid who did a trick nobody else ever did on the show, but who could show up for the more traditional songs and do them in his own style. In the end, the show wasn’t meant for him and his style, but I’ll stop anything I’m doing if I catch him on TV now to see him perform and beatbox.

Little did we know that the entire stupid thing would end up to be about Darth Vader and his problems. Granted, it was nice that he found his Good Side at the end, but that doesn’t exactly make up for killing untold billions of people. Prequels included, the series still ends with Darth Vader smiling from the afterlife while Ewoks dance, which is like ending “Band of Brothers” in a disco roller-rink with Hitler doing the Hustle with Gene Kelly. But that was still a long time away when the first movie ended.
And what an ending, eh? Han Solo — Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last — conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force — which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics — and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes.